Death Mask by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

She seized the door handle and tried to open the back door, but it was locked.
    "Can't go back now, Sissy. What's done is done. And now it has to be done again, and again, and again. No rest for the wicked, Sissy!"
    Sissy shook the door handle again, as hard as she could, and it was then that the whole door flew off, with Sissy still clinging on to it, and bounced away over the fields, bursting through the cornstalks, tumbling over and over. Sissy landed on her back in a furrow, and the door landed on top of her with a bang.
    She struggled to push the door off her, punching and kicking.
    But then she realized that it wasn't a door at all. It was heavy, but it was very soft and billowy. It was her patchwork comforter, and she was lying in her bed in Trevor and Molly's house.
    She eased herself up into a sitting position and coughed. It was intensely dark, and outside her bedroom window she could hear that it was raining. Her bedside clock told her it was 2:11 A.M.
    "You ridiculous old cow," she admonished herself. She groped for the toggle of her bedside lamp and switched it on. No cornfields, no attenuated clouds, no giants. Only a chintz-decorated bedroom with Currier Ives prints on the wall. "Maybe Trevor's right. Maybe you're always reading things into things when there isn't anything there to be read into them."
    She swallowed one of her angina pills and three large gulps of water. She remembered to hang the little beaded cover over her water glass. The first night she had stayed here, she had woken up in the middle of the night and swallowed a struggling moth along with her water.
    She lay back on her pillow and thought about her dream. Or had it been more of a memory? She had visited Uncle Henry and Aunt Mattie on their farm in Iowa once, when she was about seven, but she didn't remember driving there. She recalled her mother meeting her at Penn Station, when she was on her way home, so she must have traveled at least part of the way by train.
    But why had she dreamed about it now? And why had Uncle Henry looked like Red Mask? And what did the giant mean? Even now that she was awake, she thought about the giant and she found it frightening.
    She looked over at the DeVane cards-but no, she had promised Trevor that she wouldn't, and so she wouldn't. She switched off the light and lay there in the darkness for over an hour, trying not to think about that backward-sounding song.

CHAPTER 9 - Plague
    Molly drew up her blind for her and said, "Good morning, Sissy! Our visitors have arrived!"
    Sissy sat up and blinked at her. Molly set a glass of orange juice on the nightstand beside her and gave her a kiss on her head scarf.
    "Who's arrived?"
    "The cicadas! I thought they would, when it started to rain last night. You should see the crab-apple tree!"
    Sissy climbed out of bed and went to the window. From here, she could see the curving flower bed that ran along the left-hand side of Trevor and Molly's yard. The soil around the old crab-apple tree was peppered with countless little chimneys made of mud, and the trunk and lower branches were clustered with hundreds of glittering yellow cicada nymphs. There were even cicadas clinging to the roses and the lilies that Molly had painted.
    "My God! There are so many of them!"
    Trevor knocked on the door and came in. He was tying up his yellow necktie ready for work. "'Predator satiation,' that's what the entomologists call it. Everything eats cicadas-birds, bats, cats-even humans. They ran a recipe in last week's Post for cicada stirfry. So the cicadas make sure that their species survives by reproducing themselves by the million."
    "I thought you said they flew," said Sissy.
    "Oh, they fly all right. They're going to break out of that skin before you know it and turn into adult cicadas with wings and red eyes. They'll stay in that tree for about a week, while they dry out and their skin grows harder, and then they'll be buzzing around everywhere, and you'll be mightily sick of them.